Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone

As the winner of The Man Booker Prize 2018, Milkman has had a lot of reviews and many words shared over it. Part of my reason for wanting to read the novel was because it has been described by some as ‘difficult’. I’m never really sure what people mean when they say a novel is difficult and I was intrigued to decide for myself quite what it was they meant in this instance.

Milkman is the story of middle sister who lives in an area of Northern Ireland controlled by the local renouncers. She likes to read eighteenth-century literature while she walks. She likes to run and she likes to take French classes somewhere where people from both sides of the Troubles can meet and where her teacher ‘from over the water’ discusses the beauty of sunsets that challenge the accepted monotone colour description of the sky. She also has a maybe-boyfriend in another area that not everyone – certainly not her mother – knows about. She doesn’t act as she should. She lives as if the Troubles exist outside of her, as if they don’t affect and control her. Continue reading Milkman by Anna Burns

I’m a huge fan of Sarah Pinborough and when she called this novel ‘shocking, additive, dark domestic noir’ I knew I’d be in for a treat. Blood Orange is the kind of novel that glues you to your seat until you’re finished, forgetting the tea long cold or the dog that needs walking. You just want to find out what happens.

Alison is a barrister whose husband does most of the childcare and who frequently stays out late drinking too much in order to fall into the way of a colleague with whom she’s having an affair. Her husband knows their daughter’s schedule, packs her lunch, and often puts her to bed while Alison is having her shirt buttons ripped off in the heat of a drunken moment. Continue reading Blood Orange by Harriet Tyce

The Gallows Pole is the true story of King David Hartley and the Cragg Vale Coiners. It is both a history from the perspective of those who lost – in that the clipping and forging of coin for local benefit was stamped out by the establishment – but also a novel that enlivens a sense of the untamed landscape of Northern England in wood and moor just before the industrial revolution with its mills and mines and factories took hold.

David himself, the self-appointed King of the North, mourns an older, wilder landscape filled with wolves and his relationship with the woods and moors has a mystical quality. He sees the dance of the deer-headed men, feels the secrets of the land single him out for their mythic poetry. This connection to the land is one of the most pleasurable parts of the book. You can feel the breath of the landscape, hear the movements of creatures hidden within the trees and rocks and rivers. Setting really does live and breathe in The Gallows Pole. This visceral description of the land carries over into the interactions between people too. There is no shying away from the brutality of this history – its hardships and violence. Continue reading The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers

It wasn’t until I began reading My Life as a Rat that I remembered I hadn’t taken to Oates’ previous novel, Hazards of Time Travel. I had that sinking feeling that perhaps this novel would fail to capture my imagination too, but in fact what I uncovered was a character, Vi’let Rue, the youngest in a Irish-Catholic American family, that really did stay with me. It reminded me of something I read a long time ago about Oates’ method of writing. Though I can’t find the reference to it now (this is my disclaimer here), I remember her saying that certain stories came from a character and wrote themselves without planning. She was talking about short stories, but still, there is this feeling, as you read her work, of discovery; that the story literally unfolds in the writing. She finds the character and they tell her their story. Continue reading My Life As A Rat by Joyce Carol Oates

You Will Be Safe Here is an exceedingly powerful book with a narrative that weaves and twists in exciting ways. It might be tempting to say that the book is really about one person, Willem, a young boy sent to a camp in the outback where he can be reeducated into behaving in ways white South African Boer society would like, but in actuality the novel is threaded with multiple stories and perspectives. Continue reading You Will Be Safe Here by Damian Barr

Both novellas in the collection, Werther Nieland and The Fall of the Boslowits Family, have a strange air of directness to them. Set in Amsterdam in the Nazi occupation, the voice of the child in each instance has a self-absorbed air that distances the narrator, shows them to be too busy with the anxieties of youth to clearly see the wider implications of the situations unfolding around them. Continue reading Childhood: Two Novellas by Gerard Rose trans. by Sam Garrett

This autobiographical novel has won several prizes and it is obvious why. A biography of the narrator’s mother, Lucile, the book is self-reflexive, critical of its own approach and the narrator’s ability to summarise the experiences of a woman she only really knows from one angle, that of daughter. Continue reading Nothing Holds Back The Night by Delphine de Vigan

When I began describing the plot of this novel to a friend, they said, ‘Oh, that sounds like that series I saw on Netflix, you know, where not many women could conceive anymore and they were getting the fertile ones to be surrogates.’ Before he helpfully pointed it out, I hadn’t thought about the links to Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale because The Farm doesn’t need any change in regime, or depletion in fertility, for its surrogacy plans to flourish. It wouldn’t even surprise me if such a place already existed.

By mentioning The Handmaid’s Tale there is a sense in which The Farm can be downplayed as a bandwagon book, but what is pleasing about The Farm is that, regardless of its compelling narrative, it plays out the various sides of the argument for the existence of an expensive, surrogacy service that takes young, poor, mostly ill-educated and often immigrant women, and uses their bodies – monitoring them intensely, providing all their nutritional and physical needs – to give the babies they carry the best chance of healthy delivery. Continue reading The Farm by Joanne Ramos

Gabriel, or Gaby, is a half-French, half-Rwandan boy living in Burundi. His mother fled Rwanda in the last Rwandan war. She is Tutsi. The tribal, ethnical, and national divisions seem distant from Gaby at the beginning of the novel, but as Small Country develops, the young boy is forced to take sides. From the safety of his street he is forced into the bloodshed.

I thought I would love this story. I felt moved by its outlines, ensnared by its promises of what might unfold, of the awkward dissonance of belonging and difference. In many ways I did get what I was expecting. I was taken into Burundi. I could dip my toes into Lake Tanganyika. I was made to understand what it might feel like to hide on cold tile corridors, bolstered by multiple concrete walls far from windows. And yet…

In Chapter 23, Gaby writes about his friend who wins an argument by expressing his grief. He says, ‘Suffering is a wildcard in the game of debate, it wipes the floor with all other arguments’. In a sense any lack of appreciation I feel towards the book sits on this difficult boundary especially as there was so much to admire in Small Country. I particularly enjoyed the ending. It leaves a challenging, bitter taste in the mouth, questioning foreign interaction and interference in Africa, making Gaby’s mother a symbol of what is left after the fighting is done. And yet I still feel somehow at the same distance from events as Gaby appears to be, despite what he was forced to do. 

I’m sure many will enjoy Small Country – it has beauty, poise and shows just how oddly politics can transmute into children’s lives – but I didn’t fall in love with it.

Next week I’m reading The Farm by Joanne Ramos.